2. COMEDY.
Another marked feature of Athenian life, and one but little less influential than tragedy in its effects upon the Athenian character, was comedy. It had its origin, as we have seen, in the vintage festivals of Bacchus, where the wild songs of the participants were frequently interspersed with coarse witticisms against the spectators. Like tragedy, it was a Dorian invention, and Sicily seems to have early become the seat of the comic writers. Epichar'mus, a Dorian poet and philosopher, was the first of these to put the Bacchic songs and dances into dramatic form. The place of his nativity is uncertain, but he passed the greater part of his life at Syracuse, in the society of the greatest literary men of the age, and there he is supposed to have written his comedies some years prior to the Persian war. It seems, however, that comedy was introduced into Attica by Susa'rion, a native of Meg'ara, long before the time of Epichar'mus (578 B.C.). But the former's plays were so largely made up of rude and abusive personalities that they were not tolerated by the Pisistrati'dæ, and for over a century we bear nothing farther of comedy in Attica—not until it was revived by Chion'ides, about 488 B.C., or, according to some authorities, twenty years later.
Under the contemporaries or successors of Chionides comedy became an important agent in the political warfare of Athens, although it was frequently the subject of prohibitory or restrictive legal enactments. "Only a nation," says a recent writer, "in the plenitude of self-contentment, conscious of vigor, and satisfied with its own energy, could have tolerated the kind of censorship the comic poets dared to exercise."
Characterization of the Old Comedy.
In the preliminary discourse to his translation of the Comedies of Aristophanes, MR. THOMAS MITCHELL, an English critic of note, makes these observations upon the character of the Old Comedy: "The Old Comedy, as it is called, in contradistinction to what was afterward named the Middle and the New, stood in the extreme relation of contrariety and parody to the tragedy of the Greeks —it was directed chiefly to the lower orders of society at Athens; it served in some measure the purposes of the modern journal, in which public measures and the topics of the day might be fully discussed; and in consequence the dramatis personæ were generally the poet's own contemporaries, speaking in their own names and acting in masks, which, as they bore only a caricature resemblance of their own faces, showed that the poet, in his observations, did not mean to be taken literally. Like tragedy, comedy constituted part of a religious ceremony; and the character of the deity to whom it was more particularly dedicated was stamped at times pretty visibly upon the work which was composed in his honor. The Dionysian festivals were the great carnivals of antiquity—they celebrated the returns of vernal festivity or the joyous vintage, and were in consequence the great holidays of Athens—the seasons of universal relaxation.
"The comic poet was the high-priest of the festival; and if the orgies of his divinity (the god of wine) sometimes demanded a style of poetry which a Father of our Church probably had in his eye when he called all poetry the devil's wine, the organ of their utterance (however strange it may seem to us) no doubt considered himself as perfectly absolved from the censure which we should bestow on such productions: in his compositions he was discharging the same pious office as the painter, whose duty it was to fill the temples of the same deity with pictures which our imaginations would consider equally ill-suited to the habitations of divinity. What religion therefore forbids among us, the religion of the Greeks did not merely tolerate but enjoin. Nor was the extreme and even profane gayety of the comedy without its excuse. To unite extravagant mirth with a solemn seriousness was enjoined by law, even in the sacred festival of Ceres.
"While the philosophers, therefore, querulously maintained that man was the joke and plaything of the gods, the comic poet reversed the picture, and made the gods the playthings of men; in his hands, indeed, everything was upon the broad grin: the gods laughed, men laughed, and animals laughed. Nature was considered as a sort of fantastic being, with a turn for the humorous; and the world was treated as a sort of extended jest-book, where the poet pointed out the bon-mots [Footnote: French; pronounced bong-mos.] and acted in some degree as corrector of the Press. If he discharged this office sometimes in the sarcastic spirit of a Mephistopheles, this, too, was considered as part of his functions. He was the Ter'roe Fil'ius [Footnote: Terroe Filius, son of the earth; that is, a human being.] of the day; and lenity would have been considered, not as an act of discretion, but as a cowardly dereliction of duty."
It was in the time of Pericles that the comedy just described first dealt with men and subjects under their real names; and in one of the plays of Crati'nus—under whom comedy received its full development—Cimon is highly eulogized, and his rival, Pericles, is bitterly derided. With unmeasured and unsparing license comedy attacked, under the veil of satire, not only all that was really ludicrous or base, but often cast scorn and derision on that which was innocent, or even meritorious. For the reason that the comic writers were so indiscriminate in their attacks, frequently making transcendent genius and noble personality, as well as demagogism and personal vice, the butt of comic scorn; their writings have but little historical value except in the few instances in which they are corroborated by higher authority.
ARlSTOPH'ANES.
Among the contemporaries of Cratinus were Eu'polis and Aristophanes, the latter of whom became the chief of what is known as the Old Attic Comedy. Of his life little is known; but he was a member of the conservative or aristocratic party at Athens, directing his attacks chiefly against the democratic or popular party of Pericles, and continuing to write comedies until about 392 B.C. While his comedies are replete with coarse wit, they are wonderfully brilliant, and contain much, also, that is pure and beautiful. As a late writer has well said, "Beauty and deformity came to him with equal abundance, and his wonderful pieces are made up of all that is low and all that is pure and lovely."
The Muses, seeking for a shrine
Whose glories ne'er should cease,
Found, as they strayed, the soul divine
Of Aristophanes.
—PLATO, trans. by MERIVALE.
MR. GROTE characterizes the comedies of Aristophanes as follows: "Never probably will the full and unshackled force of comedy be so exhibited again. Without having Aristophanes actually before us it would have been impossible to imagine the unmeasured and unsparing license of attack assumed by the old comedy upon the gods, the institutions, the politicians, philosophers, poets, private citizens, specially named—and even the women, whose life was entirely domestic—of Athens. With this universal liberty in respect of subject there is combined a poignancy of derision and satire, a fecundity of imagination and variety of turns, and a richness of poetical expression such as cannot be surpassed, and such as fully explains the admiration expressed for him by the philosopher Plato, who in other respects must have regarded him with unquestionable disapprobation. His comedies are popular in the largest sense of the word, addressed to the entire body of male citizens on a day consecrated to festivity, and providing for their amusement or derision, with a sort of drunken abundance, out of all persons or things standing in any way prominent before the public eye." [Footnote: "History or Greece," Chap. lxvii.]
In his introduction to the Dialogues of Plato, REV. WILLIAM SEWELL, an English clergyman and author, observes that "Men smile when they hear the anecdote of Chrys'ostom, one of the most venerable fathers of the Church, who never went to bed without something from Aristophanes under his pillow." He adds: "But the noble tone of morals, the elevated taste, the sound political wisdom, the boldness and acuteness of the satire, the grand object, which is seen throughout, of correcting the follies of the day, and improving the condition of his country—all these are features in Aristophanes which, however disguised, as they intentionally are, by coarseness and buffoonery, entitle him to the highest respect from every reader of antiquity." Yet, while the purposes of Aristophanes were in the main praiseworthy, and the persons and things he attacked generally deserving of censure, he spared the vices of his own party and associates; and, like all satirists, for effect he often traduced character, as in the case of the virtuous Socrates. In an attack on the Sophists, in his play of the Clouds, he gives to Socrates the character of a vulgar Sophist, and holds him up to the derision of the Athenian people. But, as another has said, "Time has set all even; and 'poor Socrates,' as Aristophanes called him—as a far loftier bard has sung—
'Poor Socrates,
By what he taught, and suffered for so doing,
For truth's sake suffering death unjust, lives now,
Equal in fame to proudest conquerors.'"
—MILTON.
The Comedy of the "Clouds."
It is curious to observe in the Clouds of Aristophanes that while the main object of the poet is to ridicule Socrates, and through him to expose what he considers the corrupt state of education in Athens, he does not disdain to mingle with his low buffoonery the loftiest flights of the imagination—reminding us of the not unlike anomaly of Shakspeare's sublime simile of the "cloud-capp'd towers," in the Tempest. In one part of the play, Strepsi'ades, who has been nearly ruined in fortune by his spendthrift son, goes to Socrates to learn from him the logic that will enable him "to talk unjustly and—prevail," so that he may shirk his debts! He finds the master teacher suspended in air, in a basket, that he may be above earthly influences, and there "contemplating the sun," and endeavoring to search out "celestial matters." To the appeal of Strepsiades, Socrates, interrupted in his reveries, thus answers:
Socrates. Old man, sit you still, and attend to my will, and
hearken in peace to my prayer. (He then addresses the Air.)
O master and king, holding earth in your swing, O measureless infinite Air;
And thou, glowing Ether, and Clouds who enwreathe her with thunder and lightning and storms,
Arise ye and shine, bright ladies divine, to your student, in bodily forms.
Then we have the farther prayer of Socrates to the Clouds, in which is pictured a series of the most sublime images, colored with all the rainbow hues of the poet's fancy. We are led, in imagination, to behold the dread Clouds, at first sitting, in glorious majesty, upon the time-honored crest of snowy Olympus —then in the soft dance beguiling the nymphs "'mid the stately advance of old Ocean"—then bearing away, in their pitchers of sunlight and gold, "the mystical waves of the Nile," to refresh and fertilize other lands; at one time sporting on the foam of Lake Mæo'tis, and at another playing around the wintry summits of Mi'mas, a mountain range of Ionia, The farther invocation of the Clouds is thus continued:
Socrates. Come forth, come forth, ye dread Clouds, and to earth your glorious majesty show;
Whether lightly ye rest on the time-honored crest of Olympus, environed in snow,
Or tread the soft dance 'mid the stately advance of old Ocean, the nymphs to beguile,
Or stoop to enfold, with your pitchers of gold, the mystical waves of the Nile,
Or around the white foam of Mæotis ye roam, or Mimas all wintry and bare,
O hear while we pray, and turn not away from the rites which your servants prepare.
Then the chorus comes forward and answers, as if the Clouds were speaking:
Chorus. Clouds of all hue,
Now rise we aloft with our garments of dew,
We come from old Ocean's unchangeable bed,
We come till the mountains' green summits we tread,
We come to the peaks with their landscapes untold,
We gaze on the earth with her harvests of gold,
We gaze on the rivers in majesty streaming,
We gaze on the lordly, invisible sea;
We come, for the eye of the Ether is beaming,
We come, for all Nature is flashing and free.
Let us shake off this close-clinging dew
From our members eternally new,
And sail upward the wide world to view,
Come away! Come away!
Socr. O goddesses mine, great Clouds and divine, ye have heeded and answered my prayer.
Heard ye their sound, and the thunder around, as it thrilled through the petrified air?
Streps. Yes, by Zeus! and I shake, and I'm all of a quake, and I fear I must sound a reply,
Their thunders have made my soul so afraid, and those terrible voices so nigh—
Socr. Don't act in our schools like those comedy-fools, with their scurrilous, scandalous ways.
Deep silence be thine, while these Clusters divine their soul-stirring melody raise.
To which the chorus again responds. But we have not room for farther extracts. The description of the floating-cloud character of the scene is acknowledged by critics to be inimitable. There is one passage, in particular, in which Socrates, pointing to the clouds that have taken a sudden slanting downward motion, says:
"They are drifting, an infinite throng,
And their long shadows quake over valley and brake"—
which, MR. RUSKIN declares, "could have been written by none but an ardent lover of the hill scenery—one who had watched hour after hour the peculiar, oblique, sidelong action of descending clouds, as they form along the hollows and ravines of the hills. [Footnote: The line in Greek, which is so vividly descriptive of this peculiar appearance and motion of the clouds—
dia toy koiloy kai toy daseoy autai plagiai—
loses so much in the rendering, that the beauty of the passage can be fully appreciated only by the Greek scholar.] There are no lumpish solidities, no billowy protuberances here. All is melting, drifting, evanescent, full of air, and light as dew."
Choral Song from "The Birds."
In the following extract from the comedy of The Birds, Aristophanes ridicules the popular belief of the Greeks in signs and omens drawn from the birds of the air. Though undoubtedly an exaggeration, it may nevertheless be taken as a fair exposition of the superstitious notions of an age that had its world-renowned "oracles," and as a good example of the poet's comic style. The extract is from the Choral Song in the comedy, and is a true poetic gem.
Ye children of man! whose life is a span,
Protracted with sorrow from day to day;
Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous,
Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay!
Attend to the words of the sovereign birds,
Immortal, illustrious lords of the air,
Who survey from on high, with a merciful eye,
Your struggles of misery, labor, and care.
Whence you may learn and clearly discern
Such truths as attract your inquisitive turn—
Which is busied of late with a mighty debate,
A profound speculation about the creation,
And organical life and chaotical strife—
With various notions of heavenly motions,
And rivers and oceans, and valleys and mountains,
And sources of fountains, and meteors on high,
And stars in the sky.... We propose by-and-by
(If you'll listen and hear) to make it all clear.
All lessons of primary daily concern
You have learned from the birds (and continue to learn),
Your best benefactors and early instructors.
We give you the warnings of seasons returning:
When the cranes are arranged, and muster afloat
In the middle air, with a creaking note,
Steering away to the Libyan sand,
Then careful farmers sow their lands;
The craggy vessel is hauled ashore;
The sail, the ropes, the rudder, and oar
Are all unshipped and housed in store.
The shepherd is warned, by the kite re-appearing,
To muster his flock and be ready for shearing.
You quit your old cloak at the swallow's behest,
In assurance of summer, and purchase a vest.
For Delphi, for Ammon, Dodo'na—in fine,
For every oracular temple and shrine—
The birds are a substitute, equal and fair;
For on us you depend, and to us you repair
For counsel and aid when a marriage is made—
A purchase, a bargain, or venture in trade:
Unlucky or lucky, whatever has struck ye—
A voice in the street, or a slave that you meet,
A name or a word by chance overheard—
If you deem it an omen you call it a bird;
And if birds are your omens, it clearly will follow
That birds are a proper prophetic Apollo.
—Trans. by FRERE.